How Erdoğan’s Islamism is stunting Turkish academic achievement – analyst

The few Nobel laureates Turkey has produced have received their education abroad, a fact that underscores the strangulation of academic achievement in the country by an increasingly Islamist regime, Burak Bekdil, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, wrote.

Turkey ranks 62nd on the list of countries by Nobel laureates per capita and 35th on Science Capitals of the World’s scientific progress list, Bekdil said in an article he penned for the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, where he highlighted how Ankara’s iron fist rule over academia is wreaking havoc on Turkish scientific success.

Turkish molecular biologist Aziz Sancar of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, won the 2015 Nobel prize in chemistry. The Nobel laureate was born in poverty-stricken southeast Turkey to illiterate parents and through his hard work won a scholarship from the Turkish state scientific institute TÜBİTAK to pursue further education in biochemistry at Johns Hopkins University. He chose to remain within the American academic system.

A more recent success story claimed by Turkey is that of Özlem Türeci and Uğur Şahin, the couple behind the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

The couple have spent almost all of their lives in Germany, Bekdil pointed out.

The fact that Turkey-forged scientific achievement has failed to emerge is no coincidence, according to the analyst.

Following the failed coup attempt of 2016, Bekdil said, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “purged 15,200 Education Ministry officials along with 21,000 private school teachers. The Council of Higher Education asked the deans of the country’s state and private universities — all 1,577 of them — to resign.’’

Erdoğan has shut down a total of 626 educational institutions, and elite schools such as Istanbul Şehir University, have been taken over by government-appointed trustees.

Meanwhile, an Islamist ethos has penetrated the country’s academic institutions, according to Bekdil, with professors at reputable university’s making blatantly sexist remarks and conveying unfounded religious information.

“The effect on Turkish academics of the Islamist pill the Turks have been voluntarily swallowing since 2002 is destructive. Expect worse to come,’’ Bekdil wrote.